The villain of the year’s biggest TV hit talks Glee and butch sex appeal and staying under the radar. By Novid Parsi.

The instant we first saw Sue Sylvester – when the cheerleading coach barked at her squad, “You think this is hard? Try waterboarding. That’s hard,” – we knew we’d stumbled upon a rare, lovely union between actor and role. In Star World’s hit show Glee, Jane Lynch plays the snarling, establishment-promoting foil to the queer, minority, disabled kids in the high-school glee club. A native of Illinois, she got her break with Chicago’s seminal Second City comedy troupe, and has since starred in cult comedy films such as Best in Show, A Mighty Wind and The 40-Year-Old Virgin.

You play the nemesis of the glee club – and of glee itself – yet Sue has her own glee, a gleeful evil.
She is a gleeful evil. She finds her own heinousness very delicious. I’ve got my own inner Sue, but social propriety demands that, if I want people to like me, I can’t lead with it.

For years you were a cameo player. You’ve said strangers would ask you, “Where do I know you from?”
Yeah. “Did we go to high school together?” This one woman was convinced I was the provost of a small southern Florida university.

But surely Glee has changed that.
Walking home yesterday with my friend Jeannie, who’s getting used to it, a couple of people asked to have my picture taken with them. They were college-age kids, kind of hipster. I was never in with the hipster crowd when I was of hipster age.

What crowd did you run with?
I travelled pretty safely between groups in college. I stayed under the radar, so I was neither popular nor, you know, made a fool of. [Laughs]

And before college? Were you in the high-school show choir?
We didn’t have a show choir, but we had six or seven choirs. I was in one of them every year. The biggest choir was called Corral; the best singers in the school were in that. That was a huge coup for me.

How’d your choir experience compare to the one Glee depicts?
We were off in this building called A Building. They kind of pushed us off into another part of the school, so we weren’t held up for ridicule the way the poor Glee kids are.

Were you as competitive as Sue?
Not at all. I just wanted to stay under the radar; I wanted to just play by the rules and be another one of the kids.

You’ve said that twice now: “stay under the radar” – which kind of sums up your career. Until now.
Right, exactly, and I think always deep down inside I wanted to be a central player. Maybe I was too afraid.

Speaking of your formative years: you’ve mentioned you identified with boys most of your life.
I was a big old tomboy. I identified with all boy things. I played baseball sunup to sundown, I didn’t have much in common with other little girls, and I related to the boys. I felt like one.

Was it ever a trans identification?
No, because I was too young for it to become that big of an issue. I know some people feel like they’re in the wrong body. I completely understand that, but I started to accept my feminine nature more as I got older – and love it, too. In A Mighty Wind, I played this very sexy come-hither woman, and it really released me and got me in touch with my own feminine wiles. And it’s been lovely ever since.

How’d your family handle that boyish side of you?
Well, they probably would’ve rather I didn’t have it. My mother was mostly worried because I would get teased by the boys; one day they would like me, the next day I wouldn’t be their friend. She was just afraid I would get hurt.

Like a lot of your characters – Christy Cummings in Best in Show, Paula in The 40-Year-Old Virgin – Sue has this aggressively butch affect.
Yes, they do, don’t they? [Laughs] I guess I can’t help myself; old habits die hard. But what’s not a part of me is that aggressiveness. That’s why I put it in everything – I love people who have that entitlement and just blow into a room and take what they want.

Glee plays on Star World, Wednesdays at 9pm.